Abstract
‘I was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Stone at 7:09 P.M. on April 12, 1945. Much had happened in the months that followed. The world was undergoing great and historic changes. We had come into the atomic age.’ So began the final paragraph of Harry S. Truman’s first volume of memoirs, 1945: Year of Decisions.1 Truman began his presidency knowing nothing about ‘S-1,’ the atomic bomb project. Only a few of Roosevelt’s closest advisors knew anything about the bomb, or when, if they did know, it would actually be ready for a ‘test’. The most knowledgeable was Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson.
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Notes
Harry Truman, 1945: Year of Decisions (New York: Signet Books, 1965), 616.
Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy. The Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 237.
Quoted in Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 69.
David Robertson, Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York: Norton, 1994), 382–4.
Norman Rose, Churchill: The Unruly Giant (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 386.
Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds, Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 527–8.
Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 94.
Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, from Munich to Yalta (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 157–9.
Harry S. Truman, Mr. Citizen (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1960), 165.
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office), 1945, V, 231–3, 843–6.
While Churchill was not entirely candid about his desire to share fully in supposed post-war atomic energy bonanzas for commercial uses, he made it clear to American officials that his main interest was to be to maintain ‘future independence in the face of international blackmail that the Russians might eventually be able to employ’, Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harpers, 1962), 132.
For an excellent introduction to the problem of whether technological change is a dependent variable to political thought, or at least partly a determinant force—and, perforce, both the validation and antithesis of political belief, see Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 45—7.
Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Knopf, 1975), 26–34. Sherwin’s book remains the best study of the bomb’s impact on wartime diplomacy and post-war thinking.
G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 195–201.
Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 59.
Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 32.
Quoted in Lloyd C. Gardner, ‘The Atomic Temptation, 1945–1954’, in Lloyd C. Gardner (ed), Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1986), 169–94.
Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1995), 117.
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 526–7.
Kimball, 279–81; Martin J. Sherwin, ‘The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War; U.S. Atomic-Energy Policy and Diplomacy, 1941–1945’, American Historical Review, 78 (October 1973), 945–68.
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995), 11–13.
Elliot Rosen, ‘Intra-nationalism vs. Internationalism: The Interregnum Struggle for the Sanctity of the New Deal’, Political Science Quarterly, 81 (1966), 274–92.
Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 19.
Alan Brinkley, ‘The Idea of the State’, in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 85–121.
Randall Bennett Woods, ‘F.D.R. and the Triumph of American Nationalism’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 19 (Summer 1989), 567–81.
Quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 6.
See Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb, and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995), 375–7.
So concludes Truman’s biographer, Alonzo P. Hamby, in Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 320.
Hopkins’s cables reproduced in Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 903–4.
This important piece of evidence was recalled in Rufus Miles, ‘Hiroshima, The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved’, International Security, 10 (Fall 1985), 121–40.
Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: Morrow, 1972), 244.
Robert Ferrell (ed), Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 47.
Ernest K. Lindley, ‘The Value of the Potsdam Terms’, Newsweek, 6 August 1945, 22.
Quoted in Dan Kurzman, Day of the Bomb: Countdown to Hiroshima (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986), 415–16.
Eben Ayers, Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers, Robert Ferrell (ed), (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 60.
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Gardner, L.C. (2002). Unconditional Surrender: The Dawn of the Atomic Age. In: Carter, D., Clifton, R. (eds) War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942–62. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913852_3
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